Dropbox spinning but never syncing

 

Symptom

On Ubuntu (e.g. 24.04), Dropbox sits on:

Starting...

or reports:

Unable to monitor entire Dropbox folder hierarchy

dropbox status may show it stuck indexing or perpetually “Starting…” despite restarts.

Cause

Dropbox relies on the Linux kernel’s inotify subsystem to monitor file changes in real time.

Each file or directory requires an inotify “watch”.

Ubuntu’s default limit is often:

fs.inotify.max_user_watches = 65536

Large Dropbox folders (hundreds of thousands of files) exceed this limit.

When the watch limit is exhausted, Dropbox cannot monitor the full directory tree and stalls during startup or indexing.

This is unrelated to inodes. It is a kernel event-watch limit.

Diagnostic Test

Check your current limit:

cat /proc/sys/fs/inotify/max_user_watches

Check your file count:

find ~/Dropbox -type f | wc -l

If file count approaches or exceeds the watch limit, that is the problem.

You may also see this error explicitly:

dropbox status

Output example:

Unable to monitor entire Dropbox folder hierarchy

Solution

Increase the inotify watch limit permanently.

Set it to 1 048 576 (1 million):

echo fs.inotify.max_user_watches=1048576 | sudo tee /etc/sysctl.d/99-dropbox.conf

Apply the change:

sudo sysctl --system

Verify:

cat /proc/sys/fs/inotify/max_user_watches

Then restart Dropbox:

dropbox stop
dropbox start

Check status:

dropbox status

Dropbox should now index and sync normally.

Notes

  • 1 million watches is safe on modern systems.

  • Memory overhead is modest (roughly a few hundred MB worst case).

  • If you manage very large trees (500k+ files), this setting is effectively mandatory.

That’s it. A classic Linux watch limit issue, not a Dropbox bug.

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